The Rose Ransom (Girls Wearing Black: Book Three) (12 page)

“Everything was going well until
Saturday night,” she said.

“Didn’t look that way to me when
I found two vampire slaves chasing you across your lawn with syringes in their
hands,” said Zack.

“Yes, Melissa Mayhew sent those
slaves. And later she came to the mansion we built and killed everyone inside.”

“So you’re the only one left,”
said Zack.

“There are two others,” said
Jill. “They’ve already left. I need to leave too. One of the most powerful
vampires in Washington knows too much. If I stick around, eventually she’ll
find me out.”

Zack sat up. “I’m going with
you,” he said. “When do we leave and where are we going?”

Jill shook her head. “It’s not
that easy.”

“I won’t be denied, Jill. You’ve
seen what happens when you push me away. You’ve tried twice now. But here I
am.”

“You can’t come with me.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated, Zack.”

“Then make it simple. I think
your super-charged brain gets in the way sometimes.”

Jill smiled. “Is that so?”

“Yes it’s so. Just cut through
the crap and the answer is obvious. You’ve got no life left here. I never had
any life here until I met you.”

“Not true. You’ve got your band
and lots of friends.”

“Fluff I used to push away the
boredom, that’s all my life was. But we’ve got something real here. Let’s keep
it. Let’s go where we need to go and do this together. I’ve got a hundred and
fifty dollars in my wallet. We can get in the car right now.”

“Zack, that’s just it. I can’t
go right now. There’s something I have to do first.”

“So do it and then let’s go!”

Jill crawled out of bed. “You’re
right. I should be doing it. I should be working on it right now.”

She grabbed her panties and her
shirt off the floor.

“Wait a minute. You’re not
leaving are you?”

“Not unless I have to. How
good’s your Internet, Zack?”

“My Internet? It’s just the
plain old Internet. How good is yours?”

“No, I mean, what kind of
connection speeds…oh don’t worry about it. I’ll get my laptop out of the car
and we’ll find out.”

It turned out the Internet in
Zack’s apartment was quite good, with a T1 line running right down the middle
of the street. Jill set up her laptop in his bedroom and, within seconds, had a
secure tunnel built to the Network server farm in Colorado.

“What are you doing?” said Zack.

“A few weeks ago my friend and I
stole some data from a company named Tremblay Property Management. I need info
and I think it might be in there.”

Her fingers were flying now,
creating a search query that scanned all files looking for keywords like
Carolyn and Walter Wentworth, Melissa Mayhew, command, human programming, and
slave.

“Perhaps I should leave you to
it,” said Zack.

“It will just take a minute,”
she said. “The long part will be waiting for the search string to comb through
all the data.”

Jill finished the query and
began attaching it to recognition software on the Network’s server. By the time
she was done, her search query could scan handwritten documents and identify
Melissa’s handwriting, look for Melissa’s face in video and photos, and listen
for Melissa’s voice in audio recordings. If the command that enslaved Carolyn
Wentworth was in the TPM data, this query would find it, even if it was stored
in a voicemail, a photo, or a fax.

She finished the query before
noon, and they went out for pancakes while it ran. They came back to find it
still searching, so they went for a ride in Zack’s Corvair, driving west until
they were far from town. They parked next to the Shenandoah River, and spent a
few glorious hours sitting under a tree, listening to the water flow.

On the drive back to town, Jill
checked her phone for any new messages. She had one from Annika asking for an
update on the fake ID Jill had promised to make for Shannon. She had another
from Phillip asking if she had gotten out okay. There were texts from Mattie
and Jenny, wondering if she wanted to go shopping or see a movie. She wrote
back that tonight wasn’t good for her.

“Everything alright?” Zack said.

“Yes, my old life wants me to
keep on living it, that’s all.”

They got back to Zack’s
apartment to see that the query was done. The news wasn’t good. A single line
of text on her screen.

0 results found.

“Dammit,” she whispered.

“What does this mean?” said
Zack.

“It means the data I need isn’t
where I thought it was.”

“So where is it?”

Jill closed her eyes and cleared
her mind. There were two people who had an interest in storing the command that
enslaved Carolyn Wentworth. Melissa Mayhew was one of them. Had she chosen to
record the command for posterity, Jill would have found it on the TPM server.

The other person who might have
recorded it was her father.

“We need to go to my house,” she
said.

Zack furrowed his brow. “Your
house? I thought you were looking for data.”

“I am. My dad’s company keeps a
small server farm in our basement. It’s for my mom. She needs a ton of
computing power for some of the testing she does. Her work is all classified,
so those computers are walled off from the Internet. It’s a great place to
store the sort of secret I’m looking for.”

“Okay, so we go to your house.
Shall we leave now?”

“Not we, Zack. It doesn’t make
any sense for you to come this time.”

Zack smiled and shook his head.

“You’re not letting me go alone,
are you?” said Jill.

“Nope.”

Traffic was thick on every route
to Potomac. They tried 495, then they tried the parkway. Zack even spent twenty
minutes on surface roads Jill had never seen before. Nothing was moving. Late
afternoon stretched to early evening as they crawled across town.

By the time they pulled into the
driveway in front of Jill’s house, the western horizon was glowing orange.

“I’ll be right back,” Jill said.

“I’m coming with you,” said
Zack.

Jill knew better than to argue
with him. She pushed open the heavy door of the Corvair and ran to the house
with Zack right behind her. Her intent was to go straight to the basement so
she could install her program on her father’s computer and get out.

But she found her dad inside
waiting for her, standing directly in her way, a martini glass in his hand, a
stern look on his face.

“Dad, I thought you were still
in Seattle?”

“I got called back early. Some
business to attend to tonight. Business that concerns you, actually.”

“Concerns me? What are you
talking about?”

Jill’s father took a big gulp
from his glass. His eyes were already glassed-over. He was in no condition for
a business meeting. Something wasn’t right.

Jill’s father turned his gaze to
Zack.

“Who’s this?”

Zack, completely unfazed,
stepped forward with his hand extended.

“Hello sir, my name is Zack
Lomax. I’m dating your daughter.”

A stunned look on his face,
Jill’s father allowed his right hand to fall forward so Zack could shake it.

“Your name, sir?” said Zack.

Jill’s father cleared his
throat. “Walter Wentworth,” he said. Sliding free of Zack’s grip, Walter turned
to Jill and said, “I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

“Since when would I ever tell
you about my personal life, Dad? Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have
something to do. We won’t be long.”

“Won’t be long? What does that
mean? You can’t leave. Err…this boy can’t…”

Walter’s eyebrows climbed up his
forehead. He looked flummoxed by all this.

“You go ahead Jill,” said Zack.
“Walter and I will take this opportunity to get to know each other.”

“Go ahead? No. What’s happening
here? Jill, I want to talk to you.”

Jill pressed her lips together
as she charged out of the room. Her dad was following her with bumbling,
drunken footsteps. She couldn’t go to the basement so long as he was behind
her.

She went down the hallway,
towards one of the guest rooms, and ducked into the bathroom, careful not to
shut the door until she heard her father enter the hall. He needed to see with
his own eyes that she had gone in the bathroom and shut the door. No matter how
irrationally drunk he was, no matter what sort of nonsense it was that he wanted
from her tonight, he would wait patiently if he thought Jill was in the
bathroom. Walter Wentworth was raised with a Virginia decorum that prevented
him from yelling across a bathroom door.

This particular bathroom had two
entrances: one from the hallway and one from the guest room. After she slammed
the hallway door shut, Jill slipped her shoes off and tiptoed out into the
guest bedroom. She stood in place, waiting to hear her father walk away.

It took him forever to move. The
bumbling fool was so drunk he didn’t realize what he was doing. They had a
guest in the house and he was standing in the hallway while his daughter was in
the bathroom.

He probably wanted to talk about
the Date Auction. Yes, the Date Auction and all the attendant chatter was
enough to bring him back early from Seattle. Someone told him that Nicky won
and was now millions of dollars ahead in the contest. Walter, who had been so
skeptical of Jill and her support for Nicky, probably wanted to find out what
was in it for him if the Wentworth family got behind Nicky Bloom.

A couple slow, sliding footsteps
told Jill that her father had finally given up and was headed back to the front
room. As Walter moved, so did Jill, stepping softly on the carpet, slinking out
of the guest room and back into the hall. Her father was slurring some nonsense
at Zack now about how he had to go home, how it wasn’t a good time for company.

Zack handled it like a champ.

“We’ll be gone in just a
minute,” Zack said.

“No. Not we. You.”

“Jill and I have plans tonight,
Sir.”

“What plans?”

“We were going to have dinner at
that new restaurant in Sterling.”

“There’s a new restaurant in
Sterling?”

There you go, Zack
, she
thought.
Keep the old man talking.

 She tip-toed behind them both,
cutting under the staircase and down the far hall. The entrance to the basement
was the last door before the laundry room. Jill put her hand on the doorknob
and pulled.

It was locked.

“Dammit,” she whispered.

There were two keys to this door
in the house. One on Walter’s keyring; the other on Carolyn’s.

Jill went back up the hall and
into the front room. She made ever-so-brief eye contact with Zack, who now had
Walter talking about different kinds of gin.

“Of course, the best stuff has
its roots in early twentieth century Britain,” Walter boasted. “Not only
delicious, but also an effective cure for malaria. Let me show you a bottle my
friend Merv gave me.”

Zack put his arm on Walter’s
shoulder, preventing him from turning around. With her father’s back turned,
Jill darted up the stairs. She went past the second floor landing and up to her
mother’s office. She didn’t bother to knock on the door.

Her mother was hunched over her
keyboard in perfect stillness. Jill walked right next to her and she didn’t
even notice. The keyring Jill wanted was dangling from a hook. Ten silver and
gold keys that together unlocked all the important doors of Black Dart
Enterprises, including the server room in the basement of this house. Jill
lifted the ring slowly, wrapping her hand tight around the keys as soon as they
were off the hook. Her mother was oblivious to Jill’s presence. Whatever was
happening in Carolyn’s mind was bigger than her daughter, who was standing just
three feet away.

Jill snuck out of the study and
back down the stairs to find the front room vacant, Zack and Walter having
moved to the parlor. Poor Zack was stuck sampling all of Walter’s favorite gin.
What a miserable night for him.

He was so good to her. He
deserved better than this.

Put it out of your mind,
Jill. You’ve got work to do.

She went to the basement door
and tried the keys one at a time. On the fourth key, she got it open. She
flipped the lightswitch and went down the stairs.

The basement was a dreary room
with a white tile floor, bright fluorescent lighting, and piles of junk everywhere.
Walter was a nostalgic man who couldn’t bring himself to let go of the
possessions that defined his youth. Rather than keep them upstairs, where they
would have to be stored in a neat and presentable way, Walter kept all his
memorabilia down here. A 2
^nd
place trophy from the National Junior
Polo Championships, a framed award from the Young Businessmen of Washington, a
stack of yearbooks from elementary through high school. To get at the servers,
Jill had to push aside a milk crate holding framed photos of Walter on various
trips with Galen Renwick and Merv Tremblay.

What a motley crew they turned
out to be.

Jill sat at the screen to access
the oldest and smallest of the servers. Whatever Carolyn was working on
tonight, it wouldn’t be on this computer, which was only used when overflow
processing power was needed. Jill did a hard shutdown, then brought it back up
outside of the operating system so she could bypass the security. She put her
thumb drive in the USB port and spoke to the machine direct through the command
prompt, rewriting the bootup instructions as she went. Then she rebooted again.
This time, as the computer went through its normal startup, the operating
system began importing the contents of her thumb drive. A bar on the screen told
her it would take six minutes.

While she waited, she dug around
in the piles of junk.

She found a box full of papers
that looked like they might be important, but turned out merely to be every
essay Walter had written in college, including one titled,
Embracing Our
Place in the Universe: A Survey of the Evolving Relationships Between Humans
and Immortals
.